SelfMade App Review

A month of anxiety and really pretty photos.

I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t completely fascinated by Instagram influencers. They’re hard to describe, but you know one when you see one: They have zillions of followers and they make everything look effortless. From the way each meal dazzles like artwork behind museum glass to handstands on the balance beam of a tree branch, I’ve always wanted a taste of what it’s like to present as the perfect person — or at least, our socially constructed idea of one. That’s why I took up SelfMade’s offer to help me curate my best life on Instagram.

The app launched out of private beta last November, and already has such a devoted following that, while spots open up every day, there’s still a waitlist. It’s not hard to see why: It’s like having your own personal social media managers so you don’t have to worry about accidentally posting a – god forbid — Valencia-filtered photo taken in artificial light. And their expert services don’t come cheap. You’ll pay $50, $100, or $150 a month depending on your plan. Their founder tells me people are willing to pay as high as $750 for their most involved plan. Here’s how it works: You submit photos through the app for their specialists to edit. Within 24 hours, you receive a perfect shot based on the type of criteria you specified in a questionnaire or phone consultation. You can pre-schedule your photos on a calendar that they say maximizes engagement. You can turn on posting reminders in case you’re too busy to post because you’re, you know, living your life. Here’s how my month ‘gramming like an influencer went.

Maintain a consistent theme

I spent half an hour on the phone with Chloe, my brand manager, who asked me in-depth questions about the aesthetic I was going for. Which themes and activities did I want to display? What color scheme was I going for? How did I want the light to hit my photos? Did I want landscape shots? What kind of followers did I want to attract? I had never thought about my feed in any sort of holistic way. I’m kind of a post-as-you-go kind of gal. But this, I learned, is the cardinal sin of influencerhood. She was asking me hard questions about color and tone when I can barely make decisions about what to eat for breakfast.

Chloe explained that photos as they appear on feeds keep your existing followers, while perfectly curated feed attracts new ones. They designed me a mood board that featured several types of my photos — travel, food, fitness, and selfies (sorry, not sorry) — along with the color scheme they tend to fall into — reds, blues and greens. I was told to stick to those colors as closely as possible, and refrain from posting two of the same types of photo beside each other in order to keep it varied.

If I was going to go in on this influencer thing, I had to commit 100%. There were dozens of stunning photos collecting dust on my camera roll that I hesitated to post. What if my followers resented me for posting palm tree shots in the dead of winter? What if people thought I was insufferable for updating them on my yoga progress? Like a therapy and photography session all in one, Chloe convinced me to believe that users resort to the app specifically to gawk at beautiful photos. The platform is meant to display your best life. The same way I loved the way it looks in photos when influencers walk effortlessly through traffic (definitely a safety hazard, but do it for the ‘gram, as they say), so too will my followers appreciate a more glamorous look into my otherwise ordinary life. To quell my fear of bragging, I could also try adding more tips or information to my captions so that there is more of a takeaway for the reader, Chloe recommended.

I made it abundantly clear in my questionnaire and phone call that I wanted to retain as much of my authenticity as possible. Often, it’s our own fabricated digital lives that prevent us from shedding our filters in real life. As I write my memoir, I think about how I can be interesting and relatable off the screen as well. If I was going to have a pimple or frizz or a chipped nail, I was going to own it on my feed as well. Sadly, a photo I submitted came back with a smile wrinkle edited out. That felt like a metaphor for so many things, and not in a good way. Thankfully, the team was patient with me as I asked them to redo the edits and retain as much of their original essence as possible

When I was advised to use at least 30 hashtags per photo, my stomach nearly flipped. I hadn’t so much as used an ironic #tbt in the last few months. How was I going to commit to a paragraph of them?

Instead, I threw in four or five popular hashtags in the comments section and deleted them after 10 minutes. Power to anyone who uses them, but they just aren’t me. And that’s okay. Hashtags didn’t increase engagement in any remarkable way during the short span I left them up. But it didn’t stop there: We all have that one thing on our phones we idly do when we’re having a coffee or waiting for the bus. I was supposed to look up a hashtag like #ilovemyjob and spend 10 minutes liking photos that appeared under it. The goal was for those accounts to notice my page. This succeeded maybe four times. I want those 40 minutes of my life back.

Live in the past

Chloe noticed that I often go a week without posting a photo. Big no-no, I learned. In trying to post every day, I fretted over experiencing too mundane of a life. Rarely on an average Tuesday will I ever do something worth displaying. I was told to go back into my camera roll and post photos from the past. This made sense and depressed me at the same time.

After a month of following their instructions, I gained around 30 followers, which seemed to be pretty decent for my standards. I’ll definitely miss receiving the expert edits, but I felt bad having them toil away for someone whose heart just wasn’t in it. And by it, I mean being Instagram famous. I can tell there are so many folks out there who’d totally nail it, be obsessed with it, and go on to do fun beauty vlogs and giveaways and other Important™ influencer-like things.

To culminate the experiment, I posted a no-filter hashtag-free photo of myself. I used the time I lost normally tinkering with hashtags to searching the Costa Rican rainforest for sloths. I couldn’t find any because my eyesight is ruined from looking at my screen.